Echo Weaver

Nice! I really see the appeal of arctic starts. In my current stone age game, I also was trying to mimic a roundhouse -- a challenge in a block game. I like yours better than mine.

The amount of monsters in caves is directly related to the rift activity. What's the rift activity when you're caving? If you head in during Calm times, you might get what you're looking for. If you get deep enough, though, you're likely to get a lot of spawns at calm times too, and stronger beasts to boot. On a calm night, you shouldn't really see any surface monsters at all.

Yeah, tangentially, I'm baffled the trend in this community of posting unofficial updates that are literally just people downloading the source code and getting it to compile without doing basic testing to see if it works. What's the value of the unofficial Expanded Foods updates? The mod is literally not going to work until someone addresses the changes that came with the 1.21 release. Why do this? It gives the reasonable impression that you can do something with these mods in 1.21. I first got nailed by this when someone released a version of Still Necessaries that is just the trash can (what I want), except that all it does is compile without errors -- it doesn't work at all. Why?? /rant

Yeah, please go through all of them. The version listed for HUDClock is from a 2023 release. There are serious issues here.

Welcome to the forums! The error is in HUDClock. Make sure you are using the 1.21 version: https://mods.vintagestory.at/simplehudclockpatch ETA: hudclock 3.3.0 is not only the 1.19 version, it's not the most recent 1.19 release. Where did you download it? You may want to check all your mods to be sure you are running the most recent version, and that it's released for 1.21

Oh! I thought there were just mods to remove surface instability entirely, not a specific spot. That's nice. I'll have to recommend it the next time a new player shows up unhappy because their lovely base turned out to be unstable.

Hmm. That sounds closer to what I'd hope to see. I tried to get a sense of the tradeoffs, but I couldn't get to a point where I could visualize the effects of tweaking the settings o.O. I'll have to make a backup world and look around a bit with new settings the way I did before.

Hmm. OK. I'm going to guess that the map information is stored outside of the save file then? My game has a Maps folder in the game data. It looks like that might be it. I don't know if you're talking about the same thing, but on the Singleplayer worlds menu where you pick the world to enter, the pencil icon takes you to an edit menu. You can make a backup of your world from there, which is stored in the BackupSaves folder. You can move that backup into the Saves folder and access it from there like any other world, and its map information is disconnected from the original.

You should make a backup of your world if you're going to do this, because any objects or entities created by those mods will be invalidated.

Buh. I guess you're right. I assumed it was reputation because mine was 750, and that's a nice round number. Didn't even look at post count.

I was beginning to wonder what you had to do to get that last exalted promotion. I guess a reputation of 750. Thank you. I'd like to thank all the little people.

That's a bummer. My main world was created in 1.19, and I set the land coverage stats to match default 1.21 when I upgraded. I made a backup of the world and checked that one in creative to see if there were ugly chunk boundaries from the worldgen change, and it didn't seem to be too bad. But I'm acting on faith that those defaults do produce oceans eventually. Huh. I don't think that happened to me. Seems like it shouldn't if you made a copy. What did you do to make the copy and return to the original?

Did you create this world on the most recent version (1.21)? I think the default world gen DOES generate oceans. It just might take a journey to get to one.

Actually, this is the mistake I made that led to the difficult first winter. Well, ok, I made two mistakes that both led to it. First, I thought wild crops behaved like farmed crops, i.e. I could mark where they were and come back when they matured to get a decent harvest + seeds. Secondly, I figured that because all I saw was low fertility soil, higher quality soil was a soil upgrade, and that as I advanced I'd reach a way to enrich what I had. Wrong on both counts. Wild crops do eventually mature, but not on the kind of schedule that farmed crops do. Their ticks of advancement can happen at wildly random times, and the chunk may need to be loaded. I waited months for wild crops to mature, then found myself staring down August without nearly enough planted. The correct thing to do is to just bash those wild crops and get the seeds from them, then go home and plant them yourself. Secondly, soil quality is not made unless you're crafting terra preta with compost. (OK, you can make a permanent improvement with potash, but that's far more difficult.) If you're seeing low quality and barren soil, you're in a very arid place. Soil quality is directly related to environmental moisture. Try to find a lake or pond in a higher rainfall area (the rainfall is recorded on the summary you see when you hit C). Probably there will be more lush grass on it. That's the kind of place that's likely to have medium quality soil. Once you found it, you can just bring it back to your base, and it'll work just as well as in the moister climate.

Just a bunch of pics I searched up using Google Images. Nothing special.

I can see value to doing it both ways. After a couple of very short starts to get basic mechanics under my belt, I stuck with the first game I ran for more than a couple of hours. I was clueless about a lot of things, and it led to a VERY difficult winter where I ran out of food halfway through and spent February digging cattail roots out of the ice and running home to cook them before I froze to death. I'll never (I hope) be so completely unprepared and ignorant, and it's some of the most immersive gameplay I've ever had. You can only be completely fresh at something once, and really all you lose is time -- getting your act together in your 2nd year has the same long-term effect as getting it together in your first year.

Thought we're not an optimal class pair (Hunter and Clockmaker rather than Blackguard), my teen and I try to do this sort of tank-and-range synergy. I don the heavy-duty armor, shield, and falx, and she hangs back with the bow. The problem with this is that I'm still not terribly good at it, and she reverse kites well enough that I'm not always sure why I'm there. We also don't bring enough healing, and we've never found sulfur, so we can't max out our poultice effectiveness. Mostly, we need practice. Maybe we'll get it in the Resonance Archives. I don't know how difficult they will be, but we're way over-geared, so there's that.

After SRPENEtrante's Sep 24 art post, I pulled up some screenshots of bowtorns and stared at them. I'd assumed they were hunched over with bones sticking out their back, but now I'm sure they're bent over backwards. Woo, that's creepy body horror.

Haha. Fair enough. I actually haven't dealt with them much because my kid want them modded out of my main game, and I've only had 2 light temporal storms on my stone age game. But I sifted through the temporal storm and devastation spawn data to be sure the mod wasn't breaking anything and saw the shiver and bowtorn focused storms there.

One of them is also primarily bowtorns, which fight from a distance and thus won't charge at a fortified base.

Haha. This is basically the way I play temporal storms. A 2-wide, 3-deep pit trap is still a great way to deal with drifters and shivers to some degree. Put it along the side of the base with some trapdoors for access from the cellar, and you have a nice kill zone. When my teen joins me, she has a fortified balcony from which she can fire arrows into the pit trap. We're still refining where we place ourselves to maximize rotbeast aggro in the directions we want them to move. All-in-all very satisfying and feels immersive.

I'm under the impression that AI options expanded significantly with 1.21. Tentharchitect says they are in the process of overhauling all the Fauna of the Stone Age mods to incorporate the new behaviors.

I'd also argue against an explicit thirst bar. It seems to me that overheating can be accomplished mostly with tweaks to the existing body temp system. Most folks are proposing some variation of core temp increasing above normal, which seems like the no-brainer best way to go -- it's immersive, fairly accurate to reality, and mostly already implemented. Rather than tracking hydration directly, drinking beverages can just lower core temp slightly when one is overheated, along with being soaking wet and wearing a brimmed hat. Being in a room should cool one down the same way it warms one up, i.e. just move the player's core temp toward normal. So should going underground, as in caves. Wearing clothing with heat benefits in cool weather should increase overheating, and there can be clothing added that has negative heat bonuses instead. I rather like @Daggerdoc's idea of slowing actions before going full-on into taking damage, in the way shivering works when you're starting to freeze. @MKMoose's point about cooling in open-air but covered rooms rather than enclosed rooms makes a lot of sense, but it could start getting fiddly for the user. Perhaps open-air/well ventilated shelters are more cooling than enclosed, but enclosed can get you there. Having windows that can open for cooling also seems nicely immersive. It really seems like most of the bits you'd need to do this are already in the game.

On topic, a just saw a mod go by on ModDB that makes longer months more challenging for farming: https://mods.vintagestory.at/yieldnah

You could also call it working smarter rather than harder.